Dreams Sufism And Sainthood

Based on Muhammad al-Zawâwî's extraordinary diary of 109 dream conversations with the Prophet Muhammad, this study provides a rare, intimate view of 15th-century North African Muslim life. The study reconstructs Zawâwî's lifestory over a critical ten-year period and examines his career as a sufi in the historical context of North Africa and Mamluk Cairo. Psychological aspects of Zawâwî's religious experience are thoroughly explored. The concluding chapter provides an introduction to the role of dreams and visions in medieval Islam. Particular attention is paid to the way Zawâwî and his successors used their visions to legitimate claims to being awliya', or living saints.

Based on Muhammad al-Zawâwî's extraordinary diary of 109 dream conversations with the Prophet Muhammad, this study provides a rare, intimate view of 15th-century North African Muslim life.The study reconstructs Zawâwî's lifestory over a critical ten-year period and examines his career as a sufi in the historical context of North Africa and Mamluk Cairo. Psychological aspects of Zawâwî's religious experience are thoroughly explored.The concluding chapter provides an introduction to the role of dreams and visions in medieval Islam. Particular attention is paid to the way Zawâwî and his successors used their visions to legitimate claims to being awliya', or living saints.

This book provides translations of the earliest Arabic autobiography and the earliest theoretical explanation of the psychic development and powers of an Islamic holy man (Saint, Friend of God).

Robert Rozehnal traces the ritual practices and identity politics of a contemporary Sufi order in Pakistan: the Chishti Sabris. He takes multiple perspectives from the rich Urdu writings of Twentieth Century Sufi masters, to the complex spiritual life of contemporary disciples and the order's growing transnational networks.

The first full-length study devoted tothe life and mystical experiences of one of the outstanding figures in Persian Sufism.

The recent centennial of the original publication of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams has generated a new wave of critical reappraisals of this monumental work. Considered one of the most important books in Western history, scholars from an astonishing variety of academic fields continue to wrestle with Freud's intricate theories and insights. Dreams is a long overdue collection of writing on dreams from many of the top scholars in religious studies, anthropology, and psychology departments. The volume is organized into three thematic sections: traditions, individuals and methods. The twenty-three articles highlight the most important theories, the most contentious debates, and the most far-reaching implications of this growing field of study.

Dreams and visions have always been important in Islamic societies. Yet, their pervasive impact on Muslim communities and on the lives of individual Muslims remains largely unknown and rather surprising to Westerners. This book addresses this gap in understanding with a fascinating and diverse account, taking readers from premodern Islam to the present day. Dreams and visions are shown to have been, and to be, significant in a range of social, educational, and cultural roles. The book includes a wealth of examples detailing the Sufi experience. Contributors use Arabic, Persian, Indian, Central Asian, and Ottoman sources and employ approaches grounded in history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, religious studies, and literary analysis. This is an illuminating work, showing how ordinary Muslims, Muslim notables, Sufis, legal scholars, and rulers have perceived both themselves and the world around them through the prism of dreams and visions.

This book explores the organic lives of popular Sufi shrines in contemporary Northwest India. It traverses the worldview of shrine spaces, rituals and their complex narratives, and provides an insight into their urban and rural landscapes in the post-Partition (Indian) Punjab. What happened to these shrines when attempts were made to dissuade Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from their veneration of popular saints in the early twentieth century? What was the fate of popular shrines that persisted even when the Muslim population was virtually wiped off as a result of migration during Partition? How did these shrines manifest in the context of the threat posed by militants in the 1980s? How did such popular practices reconfigure themselves when some important centres of Sufism were left behind in the West Punjab (now Pakistan)? This book examines several of these questions and utilizes a combination of analytical tools, new theoretical tropes and an ethnographic approach to understand and situate popular Sufi shrines so that they are both historicized and spatialized. As such, it lays out some crucial contours of the method and practice of understanding popular sacred spaces (within India and elsewhere), bridging the everyday and the metanarratives of power structures and state formation. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers and those engaged in interdisciplinary work in history, social anthropology, historical sociology, cultural studies, historical geography, religion and art history, as wel as those interested in Sufism and its shrines in South Asia.